


in the clear

by radialarch



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, war stories as love stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:07:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24693496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: Before the Western Rebellion, and after the war: the making and unmaking of Felix Hugo Fraldarius.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 5
Kudos: 49





	in the clear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sumaru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sumaru/gifts).



> for lin, who wanted dimilix + tswift's "out of the woods", for her [kind donation](https://radialarch.tumblr.com/post/620133566474551296) to reclaim the block. contains way more discussion of ptsd than you'd think from that description.
> 
> enormous thanks to lucy for wrangling every possible tense in the english language, truly.

It’s dark when Felix stirs, and next to him the bed is empty. The sheets barely hold a trace of warmth when he reaches out a questing hand, and the candle on the bedside table is unlit and untouched.

The war’s been over for years. Felix’s body still remembers how to jerk from half-sleep to battle-ready in an instant; only the enemy has changed. He and Dimitri have a contingency plan, devised after the third time, and now Felix reaches not for the knife but for the candle. 

Dimitri is not an easy man to miss, but the castle is large. By the time Felix finds the open door, the chill is stealing into his fingers, his stockinged feet.

The room is sparsely appointed: one of the guest apartments, smelling mostly of dust. The balcony doors are thrown wide open, and beyond that—Dimitri, leaning against the stone balustrade, clad only in his nightshirt. Felix walks across the room slowly, without trying to stay quiet, but Dimitri doesn’t look back.

So it’s that kind of night.

Felix doesn’t reach out, even though it’s freezing in the pre-dawn and Dimitri must be chilled to the bone. Dimitri is always shaken after his nightmares, and guilt makes him worse. The second time, Felix put a hand on his shoulder and Dimitri blindly, reflexively tried to throw him into a wall. When Dimitri woke with Felix’s iron grip on his wrist, he went white with terror and wouldn’t touch Felix for a week. Felix is capable of handling the situation; Dimitri is not, so Felix avoids it when he can.

Instead, he talks. Not loud, just conversational. He doesn’t remember when they figured this out. Maybe the fourth time, or the fifth. It had taken Felix longer to find Dimitri back then, halfway up one of the towers. “You remember when we climbed up here,” he said, too exhausted to feel the sting of the memory, “and Glenn had to come carry you off under his arm because we wouldn’t leave?” Dimitri hadn’t made a sound, but something in him went still, like the whole of him was one held and waiting breath. So Felix kept on talking until the candle burned down, until his voice had turned thin and gone, and somewhere during the night Dimitri had heard and come back to him, crawled bit by bit out of the dark place inside his head.

Felix sits on the floor by the balcony, the candle set beside him where it won’t gutter. He looks up at the line of Dimitri’s jaw, stark in the flickering light, and catches hold of a memory.

“Do you remember,” he says, “that night in Charon?”

A year after Dimitri came back from Duscur, he squired for one of Count Charon’s sons. Rodrigue thought it was too soon. Felix has a vivid memory of his father saying, “Your Highness, no one would think it unusual if you needed more time—” before Dimitri cut him off. 

“Rodrigue,” he’d said, “I am tired of being coddled like a child,” and it was the first time Felix understood, viscerally, what it meant that Dimitri would one day be king. Dimitri had looked almost like a stranger, hard and unyielding, and as Rodrigue bowed in acquiescence Felix was struck by the strange thought that his father was getting old.

If Glenn had still been alive he would have been assigned to Charon along with Dimitri; but he wasn’t, so Felix went in his stead, squire to a nephew of the count with a minor crest. Strictly speaking, his new knight-master should have been his first priority, but everyone knew he was a Fraldarius. He didn’t resent that assumption, but he did resent Dimitri’s new shadow, whom Dimitri called Dedue and Felix refused to call anything at all.

“What are you _doing_ with him?” Felix had asked once. “You don’t need him.” 

“I do need him.” That had been Dimitri’s only reply, uncharacteristically sharp, and it did nothing for the amorphous tightness in Felix’s chest whenever he saw the boy at Dimitri’s heels. It would take another year for the feeling to crystallize to anger; nearly a decade before he understood that Dimitri had been haunted by the ghosts of Duscur even before Dedue.

Had Felix known back then that Dimitri was on the brink of breaking? Surely not. At fifteen, Felix had been consumed with helpless fury: at Glenn for dying, at his father for letting him. Easy enough to attribute Dimitri’s rare lapses to the grief of a boy for his parents, a prince for country; impossible for Felix to imagine that Dimitri might fall, that he was even capable of falling.

But there _had_ been that night in Charon. Reported bandit activity near the border with Galatea, a troop of knights sent out to patrol. It had been bitterly cold for autumn, the tips of tree branches frosted in the mornings, and in his borrowed furs Felix had been shivering. Dimitri didn’t seem to feel it, though, face turned like a compass to the north. Dedue was sick with fever back at the fort; there hadn’t been anyone else to look at him.

Felix had been afraid. Terrified, as laughable as it is now. He can’t recall what he feared more, the killing or the being killed, just that it had rendered him breathless in the cold. When the knights made camp he ate very little, face pale, and in the evening his knight-master sent him early to bed out of pity. He’d started awake in the night with a scream caught between his teeth and then lay still as the terror turned to shame; but in the long silence that followed, something made him stir from the shallow warmth of his cot and grope out into the cold, quiet dark, hand on his sword.

Had Dimitri made a sound? This is the limitation of memory. After the Western Rebellion, Felix would return to this moment, worry it smooth like a river stone, unable to discover the truth. Had _Dimitri_ known then that he was sinking into a madness where only the dead could follow? Whose failure had it been, that he succeeded: Dimitri’s, in his silence, or Felix’s, for not hearing? 

Neither possibility is better; but the uncertainty eats at him more.

The dark might be lifting, or it might be a trick of the candle. Felix touches the tips of his fingers to each other, trying to coax some warmth back into them. His back is stiff where it's been pressed against stone. He's getting soft, he has to admit. During the war, Felix could sleep anywhere and ride out the next morning in full armor. Back then, he never stopped to think that peace meant the chance to grow up, to grow old.

On the balcony, just out of reach, Dimitri is still as a statue, his face turned up to the night. That's what made Felix remember. His breath a thin white plume in the darkness; Dimitri, looking to the stars for an answer to some question only he could hear.

At the edge of camp, the woods swallowed up all color and left only silhouettes. But Felix had known Dimitri the whole of his life, could’ve recognized him blind. “Hey,” he said, throat dry, and let his hand slip from his sword. “Are you all right?”

Dimitri had been armed, fingers tight enough on his lance that they showed white in the gloom. He didn’t respond at first, so long that Felix wondered if he’d heard. He’d been looking somewhere, but when Felix followed his gaze all he saw was more forest. On a map, the forest sprawled all the way north to the Tailtean plains. 

“Think we’ll find them?” Dimitri finally said, so low it was nearly a growl, and Felix realized he meant the bandits.

The thought of meeting one made Felix sick. A year ago he’d have said so; but a year ago he wouldn’t have been here. At fifteen, Felix had yet to fully grasp the meaning of losing Glenn, but the absence had already begun to shape him. Honesty had become a virtue Felix could no longer afford.

“Don’t know,” Felix said, letting his sleeves slip back over his hands. The overcoat was too big for him. “Maybe.” 

Dimitri turned to him then, and his eyes glittered in the dark. “Good,” he said. “I hope we do. They should be punished.”

No one would have expected the squires, green as they were, to be in the thick of the fight. Felix remembered the cold slipping in under his collar, the heavy weight of the sword at his belt, the looming reality of his own inadequacy. By contrast, Dimitri’s colorless face and the strangeness of his mood had, in the moment, seemed unimportant.

Seen through a different lens, the problem might have been quite clear. It was, when he looked back at sixteen, far too late with blood cooling on Dimitri’s hands. For a long time after the Western Rebellion, Felix blamed his own weakness for not having seen the signs. He never let himself be in that position again, but that wouldn’t change the fact that he’d already lost Dimitri.

Felix still feels the sting sometimes, when he’s not careful. During his yearly sojourn to the mausoleum on the Fraldarius estate; the times Dimitri rides to meet Dedue in Duscur—what was Duscur, what is again becoming Duscur—and goes silent at flowers grown from a once blood-soaked land; nights like tonight, when the past is more real than the future. He tried to remake himself once, with all the desperation and finesse of a sixteen-year-old boy, and nearly succeeded. It took him far longer to learn that some problems cannot be solved with a sword and his own two hands. He is still learning it.

Morning’s coming. It’s in the way the grey light softens Dimitri’s features, the candle burnt down to a stub. Maybe there’s a waiting air in the tilt of Dimitri’s head. Maybe he hasn’t heard a thing.

“You must consider the possibility that one day I will not come back,” Dimitri had said, when they first drew up the plan. “As much as I wish otherwise, I cannot give you false hope.”

The war lives in all of their bodies still. There are days Sylvain spends tense with one hand gripping his dagger; some nights Ingrid spends in the stables with her fingers in her pegasus’s pinions instead of her bed. It took Felix a year to start grasping what it meant to be alive, other than _waiting for death_ —he still forgets, sometimes, in the brief space between sleeping and waking. 

And yet, for all that Felix knows this intimately, Dimitri’s body _is_ the war. The madness has as much claim to Dimitri as Felix does.

Felix spent eight years trying to claw Dimitri back out toward the light, left bloody scratches in both of their hearts. He's learned in the years since, imperfectly and in stages, how to be more patient.

“I know,” he’d said, looking straight into Dimitri’s worried eye. “I won’t hold it against you.” He meant it then, and he means it still. One day Dimitri’s generous heart will cease; one day Dimitri’s tired body will give up the fight. Until then, Felix keeps his vigil. That’s easy.

When the sun comes up, Felix is momentarily blind. He blinks the spots from his eyes, puts a hand to his brow, and then: there’s Dimitri, limned with light. “Felix?” he says in a rusted voice, crouching down to peer into Felix’s face. “How long has it been?”

The length of a candle; the length of a night. A lifetime, by some measures. Felix isn’t keeping count. “Not long,” he says, and groans when Dimitri pulls him up to his feet. “Your fingers are freezing.”

“Apologies,” says Dimitri, because Felix has forbidden him from apologizing for more than that. He lets go of Felix’s hand, and Felix takes Dimitri’s back. He’s endured worse than cold fingers. 

“Come back to bed,” Felix says. He says it every time, and every time Dimitri is freshly surprised. Behind him the sky is a watery gold, and Felix wants to sleep.

Dimitri hesitates, poised on the threshold. “Are you all right?” he says. He doesn’t say _thank you_. Felix has forbidden that, too.

They spent so long trying to get this answer right, the two of them. Felix has it now. “For now,” he says, “yes.” And this time, when he tugs Dimitri back into the warmth—Dimitri comes.

**Author's Note:**

> some extremely self-indulgent dvd commentary can be found [here](https://radialarch.dreamwidth.org/13077.html)


End file.
